He has been granted bail pending the appeal, which will be heard in March next year so cyclists are still advised to take care around that area.

Committee for Next Year

The Annual General Meeting of the ACTVets will be held on the 24th February 2014. We are always looking for new committee members so if you are interested, please consider nominating for next year’s committee.

I will need a couple of helpers on the night. If you are racing you can still get there early or stay after your race to help out.

Important Information: Late Arrivals

It is a condition of our Insurance that all riders receive a referee’s briefing before the commencement of racing to ensure that they are aware of racing conditions.

All riders need to ensure that they arrive in sufficient time to sign-on and be briefed before the commencement of racing.

RACE REPORTS:

Stromlo Criterium – 10th December

It was very hot & windy, when G Grade lined up to start, but there was a minor hiccup at 5.45 as there was no Race Director/Referee. Fortunately, Stu (First Aid) quickly offered to do the Timing, Bell & Number calling, Fergus Nelson (E grade) (& racing towards the end of the night), Paul Robey & James Meredith all assisted with the running of the races.

In G Grade, a friend of Jing Huang, Natalie Attenborough having her Trial ride, had no trouble winning the sprint from James Meredith & Jing Huang.

A grade consisting of 19 riders soon set a fast pace with Paul Scherl attacking & breaking away for many of the laps before being reeled in, only to attack again & this time he stayed away to win from Mark Harris & Sean Ifland.

B grade had 23 riders start and it took A grade about 20 mins to catch & pass them. Simon Junakovic won the sprint from Brian Goodspeed & Chris Wilson.

There were only 9 riders in C Grade & just about stayed together for the Sprint with Michael Langdon winning from Terry Danaher & Phil Walker.

For those riders who could face the truth they were greeted by perfect conditions - hardly any traffic, mild temperatures and no wind. A total of 35 riders turned out to test themselves against the might of Mount MacDonald. Congratulations to the winners in the various grades, they were: G grade – James Meredith in a time of 20’17”, F grade – Mary Lovett in a time of 16’35”, E grade – Terence Merrigan in a time of 15’, D grade – Julian Valtas in a time of 14’24”, C grade – Dale Teddy in a time of 13’63”, B grade – Henry Thomson in a time of 12’47” , and A grade - Tom Hartley in a time of 12’25”.

Commiserations to Robert Quilty who missed out on winning D grade by less than a second, which demonstrates that at whatever level of time trialling one wrong gear change can make the difference between winning and losing!.

Thanks to Owain Tilley for Race Refereeing

Report from the Tandem

This is a race where the Heavy Tandem is really on a hiding to nothing. There is little chance that we’d beat anyone in our grade up a hill, which is probably appropriate. If we were average climbers in our grade, we‘d probably use our descent and TT advantage to win a race or two and would get promoted to D grade. Our main challenge was to beat our time from last year (18.22).

Before the start I did lay down the challenge to Phil Coulton and Michael Fawke. Phil because we beat him last time by about 10 seconds, and Michael because he beat us with maximum speed last time. This time (after a couple of poor starts under pressure last week) we got away pretty smoothly, I got my foot in first time and found my way onto the saddle with no drama and we quickly settled into a rhythm and simply rode as hard as we could.

We did have a couple of changes to the bike since last week, the saddle tilt has been adjusted, and we have moved the cranks to 90degrees out of phase. We have experimented with this before on my bike and found it much smoother although it does put the kybosh on out of the saddle work.

I’d love to tell of great heroics on the climb however the reality involved lots of heavy breathing and not much power. We did manage to negotiate the climb without resorting to the small chainring, which was a bit of an achievement for us, although the 42x34 did get a bit of a workout. We started 30 seconds behind Phil, and had him in sight for most of the way, but when the road tilted down he disappeared from view. We did manage to touch pedals to the tarmac on a couple of the corners on the final bit, but I don’t think that the few pedal strokes that we didn’t do after that cost us a great deal in terms of time.

In the end we failed to beat Phil who came in at 17.00 ,talking to him afterwards it seems that he has ditched the work that was costing him vital hours on the bike and he is now both fitter and lighter (and creeping onto the handicapper’s radar for promotion)

We also missed out on the fastest maximum today. Despite Strava giving us a maximum of 68.4 the measured speed was 63.2, however this wasn’t enough to get up to Michael’s 64.9. This was a ‘Pedaling descent’ so it does favour big blokes who actually produce some power.

Despite these losses a gain of 1.12 is a pretty dramatic improvement and we are quietly thrilled with that.

I’m sure that the handicapper is studying the results carefully, with particular note to the winners who mostly would have featured mid-pack in the next higher grade. However not all of them feature regularly in the placings, which gives me some hope to think that climbing isn’t everything when it comes to performing at this level.